10 Dialogue Mistakes To Avoid in Fiction
I had quite a bit of feedback on my last dialogue blog, How To Write Effective Dialogue For Fiction, Part 1.
In that blog, I broke great dialogue into two separate elements: character and the third thing.
That is, great dialogue starts with a complete understanding of the character that is speaking. They are saying words only that character could say. It is distinct to that character. But beyond that, there’s a third thing at play with great dialogue. There’s the said, the unsaid, and the unsayable. There’s an internal motivation that the character isn’t even aware of. It is something they don’t even know they need, beyond basic wants and desires.
If you can accomplish those two aspects of a great dialogue, you’ll be well on your way. But if I were to stop there, it would be like saying “a great suit always has both a pair of pants and a blazer.” That’s logically true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
That’s why today I’m going over mistakes to avoid when writing dialogue.
Avoid Phonetic Spellings and Accents
There’s nothing a reader hates more than having to sound out phonetic concoctions of english words, meant to instill some sense of dialect. It gets old real fast and brings the reader out of the story every time they have to think about how to say or pronounce a word.
The ‘running dream’ of the story evaporates every time I read a phonetic spelling or accent.
Mirror Emotion To Language
Watch someone get angry, or sad, or happy, or elated, or high, or drunk. Their use of language will change as their emotional state changes.
For example, the more emotional you become, the shorter and to the point your sentences become. The more rational a character is, the bigger words and sentences they use. Understand the type of emotional and intellectual temperament your character has and mirror their words to the character.
Dialogue Tags
The only purpose of a dialogue tag is to tell the reader who is talking. If it’s clear from the words that are being said, you don’t need a dialogue tag. If there’s two people and the reader can follow who is saying what, you don’t need dialogue tags.
If you want dialogue tags, you can use character actions to tell the reader who is talking (and should use dialogue tags and character actions interchangeably).
When using dialogue tags, I’d recommend sticking to one construction like “[pronoun / noun] said”.
If you switch between [noun said] and [said noun] you’ll find that pronouns can only go one way “he / she said” and can never go “said she” (or at least, they shouldn’t). So, for consistency's sake, you should stick with “[pronoun / noun said]”.
And ‘said’ is the correct speaker attribution ninety percent of the time, every time.
Empty Talk
Newer writers have this desire to create misplaced verisimilitude by filling dialogue with the kind of empty talk that we see and hear in everyday speech. It’s the type of speech that those who decry “small talk” are referring to.
When you walk into an office and someone goes “how are you?” and you reply robotically, “I’m good, how are you?”
That’s the kind of empty talk I’m referring to. Humans do it, but characters should not because it’s boring, it’s empty, and it’s meaningless. It reveals nothing about anything and your characters should avoid it.
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Exposition Through Dialogue
This mistake is more common than it should be in popular fantasy and science fiction and I’m not quite sure why that is. This mistake occurs when, for example, two married couples talk about the day they met, or how they met, or what they said when they first met, for the sole purpose of telling that information to the reader, while at the same time being an unnatural talking point for the two characters.
How many times have you asked a friend of yours: “How long have we been friends?”
(The answer, I presume, is almost never).
Distinct Voice
Read the words of a character and cross reference them with another character. If they’re stacked, without dialogue tags, can you understand who said them? What makes those words unique to that character? What do they reveal about the character? Is the content distinct?
If you answered no to any of those, you may have created words that aren’t based on that character, but some other source.
Rethink those words, your understanding of the character, and what you want to accomplish by those words.
Using Characters Name Too Often
This is another common giveaway of a relatively new writer and I’m not quite sure where the compulsion comes from, but I do know that I had it for the first year or two and have noticed it in other newer writers, as well.
“Pass me that fork, Frank.”
“What do you think, John?”
“Nice to see you, James.”
“You smell nice, Patricia.”
If you were to examine how people talk, you’ll notice that we say names a lot less often than writers think. In the above examples, if you delete those names, the sentences work just the same.
Being Too Formal
While writers who rely heavily on phonetics and accents can be annoying, so can language that is too formal. Make use of informal words like “ain’t,” or contractions, or cut off words like “lookin’.”
Have fun with words and language.
Listen to how people use shortcuts in language, or relax their structures, or omit words or place them in their regional dialects. Give the character a distinct style or voice, but don’t make it annoying or unnatural.
Lacking Subtext
No one says everything they mean. Find ways to talk around subjects, to hint at deeper meanings, to misunderstand, and to not answer characters directly. Dialogue that is too “on the nose” will sound like two robots interpreting only the surface level of each and every word.
This is not how people communicate. We are complex, diabolical creatures who layer our speech in many different ways.
Explore those ways.
Internal Monologue
While not a traditional conception of dialogue, it is dialogue in a way. Internal monologue is the character talking directly to the reader (though they don’t know it).
A lot of writers use internal monologue as a way to tell the reader the things that they’re failing to effectively communicate on the page. Try to find ways to communicate these things by showing the reader instead of telling them.
